Since the end of the sixties a small but significant number of political movies have been screened to national and international audiences attending mainstream theatres. But in the last ten years the rate of political film production appears to be on the increase worldwide. Is this a sign that more directors want to use film to influence the electorate’s thinking, or are they just jumping on the ‘social consciousness’ bandwagon driven to such lucrative success by the likes of documentary personalities such as Michael Moore?
At the heart of political filmmaking is the belief that truth can be expressed in a 90-minute feature. The supposed alignment of the truth with visual representation is drawn from maxims such as ‘seeing is believing’ with its corollary ‘the camera never lies.’ Indeed, the first film camera used for commercial purposes was called the Veriscope, literally meaning ‘truth viewer.’
The idea that truth could be relayed through film was not lost on government strategists who used the medium as a means of delivering state propaganda. Initially the state’s hijacking of cinema’s potential to influence people had a disheartening effect on artists and intellectuals also interested in the medium. However, following the social upheaval that had its greatest expression in the decade of the Sixties, filmmakers seemed to grow more confident in their ability to question received notions of wisdom. As Charles Musser wrote in the University of San Francisco Law Review: “…because America experienced a President in Ronald Reagan who had little concern with truth, accuracy, or even objective reality, truth seemed to be a term worth contesting.”
The main weapon filmmakers had up their sleeves was
the documentary. For many years perceived as the purists’ form of film as it attempted to portray things as they really were without any intentional artistic, intellectual, moral, or any other bias. Of course the minute a camera starts rolling the ‘truth’ it captures can be said to be subjective but what is significant is that it is presented to its audience as being true. And claiming to represent the truth is something that the current barrage of political films all has in common.
It may have been opened previously but the contents of Pandora’s box were well and truly tipped out following the release of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004). The film was released and lauded as a documentary. It expressed a political truth as perceived by its makers. But the film was so one-sided it has been accused of having more in common with propaganda than honest documentary-making. By cutting archive footage with contemporary interviews and explosive/incendiary narrative by Moore, the movie is a blend of carefully edited fact and fantasy that is disconcertingly loose when to comes to presenting accurate information.
If Moore’s films achieve nothing else, then they have at least proved beyond reasonable doubt that movie audiences love a juicy political story well-told. And they don’t seem too concerned with how it’s told. A new movie about some of the sordid exploits of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi conveniently blends archive footage with dramatic reenactments, obscuring the boundaries between each in direct contravention of the documentary code. Whilst fiction films such as Syriana based on real political events presenting insider stories as thinly disguised fact, rather than fictionalized accounts of things that might have occurred, the inference being that the events depicted in the film actually happened (are true) as opposed to imagined (might be true).
The shift is disconcerting for traditional documentary makers who believe that only by sticking to carefully refined principles do films stand any chance of being taken seriously as truthful artifacts.
Ultimately truth resides in the hearts and minds of the audience, and perhaps more significantly in their subsequent actions. To what extent film can muster significant influence over the latter remains unclear.