Why do contemporary American documentaries tend to shy away from the character ambiguities that are so productive for fictional film cinema? Is it that the talking heads who inhabit these films happen to be real people and not scripted characters, and the directors fear coming across as the morally irresponsible should they neglect to segregate the villains and the heroes with a golden ruler? Or is it that the contemporary documentary, as an aesthetic form, simply requires a certain kind of reductive logic to create filmic tension where there might otherwise be only discourse? Either way, the surfeit of certainty and self-congratulatory humanism in the normative doc tends to put me off, or remind of Godard’s grumpy insight that Michael Moore is, in reality, only a hair more intelligent than the corporate blockheads he skewers.
-David Zuckerman