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Documentary in an Age of Terror

2005; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/scr.2005.0040

1549-3377

Lynn A. Higgins,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

Noting that "blockbuster documentary" is no longer an oxymoron, the essay investigates the recent renaissance of documentary genres in the light of the post-9/11 American political and cultural climate. It suggests that the recent appetite for documentaries might arise from anxieties about access to reliable information about the real. In a context where more and more information is "classified," officially and unofficially commodified, or subjected to outright falsification, and where the technologies for image-manipulation are increasingly sophisticated, the filmmakers and other image-makers studied here use various rhetorical, generic, and narrative strategies to resist the replacement of reality by images. The emergence of the "making of" subgenre suggests that all images can now credibly depict is insight into how mediation works. Examples include Morgan Spurlock's Supersize Me, Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf's contribution to the collection of short films entitled 11-9-01: September 11, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers, Terry Gilliam's Lost in La Mancha, and Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye Lenin!.