The Toronto International Film Festival has recently become a forum not just for critics of film, but critics of journalistic ethics as well. With activist-film darling Michael Moore's recent debut and unexpected government officials present, the festival events Sunday became fraught with politics.
A recent New York Times article aimed to shed light on the (perhaps) criminal underbelly of documentary filmmaking. Many, including Moore, have been less than honest with us in trying to accomplish a social or political goal, distorting and often completely ignoring the truth.
After the screening of Michael Moore's latest offering, "Capitalism: A Love Story," a panel of filmmakers, producers, and others, met to discuss honesty in documentary filmmaking. Adding to the theatrics, government film commissioner and national chairperson of the Film Board of Canada, Tom Perlmutter, showed up out of the blue to put his own two cents in.
Focusing on a recent report from the Center for Social Media at American University, titled “Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work”, the panel debated what alterations of the truth were allowable, if any. Some nasty revelations were made in the report, concluding that many documentary filmmakers will draw upon impact over honesty in revealing the film's "higher truth."
An unflattering parallel could be drawn to the techniques employed by exploitation filmmakers and one documentarian, who when interviewed admitted to telling crew members to break the legs of rabbits "in order to get better shots of animals being hunted by others in the wild." The only comparison in recent history as gruesome as this can be found in the controversial 1980 film "Cannibal Holocaust" which was banned in over 50 countries, partly for its real on-camera depiction of animal cruelty.
So, can these documentarians be blamed for their morally corrupt techniques? Should we ban these practices, or do the ends justify the means? I hope these filmmakers can find a way to promote social justice without degrading it in the process.
A recent New York Times article aimed to shed light on the (perhaps) criminal underbelly of documentary filmmaking. Many, including Moore, have been less than honest with us in trying to accomplish a social or political goal, distorting and often completely ignoring the truth.
After the screening of Michael Moore's latest offering, "Capitalism: A Love Story," a panel of filmmakers, producers, and others, met to discuss honesty in documentary filmmaking. Adding to the theatrics, government film commissioner and national chairperson of the Film Board of Canada, Tom Perlmutter, showed up out of the blue to put his own two cents in.
Focusing on a recent report from the Center for Social Media at American University, titled “Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work”, the panel debated what alterations of the truth were allowable, if any. Some nasty revelations were made in the report, concluding that many documentary filmmakers will draw upon impact over honesty in revealing the film's "higher truth."
An unflattering parallel could be drawn to the techniques employed by exploitation filmmakers and one documentarian, who when interviewed admitted to telling crew members to break the legs of rabbits "in order to get better shots of animals being hunted by others in the wild." The only comparison in recent history as gruesome as this can be found in the controversial 1980 film "Cannibal Holocaust" which was banned in over 50 countries, partly for its real on-camera depiction of animal cruelty.
So, can these documentarians be blamed for their morally corrupt techniques? Should we ban these practices, or do the ends justify the means? I hope these filmmakers can find a way to promote social justice without degrading it in the process.
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