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Berlin, Germany Saturday, September 13th saw the beginning of a new season of the KAOS Kino Klub in Berlin. The club’s concept is to combine the screening of thought provoking films and documentaries with a subsequent discussion lead by an invited expert in the field. This year’s season opener focused on the more than controversial figure of Michael Moore with the showing of 2007’s Canadian documentary Manufacturing Dissent (subtitled “Michael Moore is a Liar!” for the evening). Special guest of the night was Dr Alan Taylor, current lecturer at the prestigious John-F-Kennedy Institute at the Free University in Berlin and expert in the film studies and media department. The discussion was led by Karl-Heinz Kloppisch Jr, one of the founders of the club together with co-founder and organizer of the evening Sonia Petner. Canadian filmmakers Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk supposedly began making the film as fans of Michael Moore, but ended up revising their picture of him during the actual shooting. Going from documentary filmmaker to be admired to questionable polemicist, the documentary attempts to expose Moore as a manipulative filmmaker who plays fast and loose with the truth, distorts facts to fit his personal agenda and generally makes films more about himself than the subject at hand.
To expose the bad boy of documentaries, the film examines core sequences of Moore’s films, showing their staged nature, and combines that with interview footage of persons ranging from (unwilling) participants in his films to fellow documentary maker Errol Morris. All this is couched in the overarching narrative of attempting to get an interview with the man itself, which – unsurprisingly – is unsuccessful and an ironic mirroring of Moore’s own Roger and Me, thus equating Moore with General Motor’s CEO Roger Smith in a less than subtle move. While it’s certainly valid to expose untruths and the staged distortion of facts in Moore’s films, one cannot help but feel that there is a lot of bitterness involved when it comes to the filmmakers as well as wondering if it is actually anything new in regards to Moore and the craft of documentary making itself. Considering David Mamet’s comment in his book On Directing Film how “Documentaries take basically unrelated footage and juxtapose it in order to give the viewer the idea the filmmaker wants to convey.”, documentaries, in other words, are no different from any other film in the way they convey meaning through the editing of uninflected images. The crucial difference being that no one expects Mamma Mia! to tell the truth, whereas documentaries are supposed to.
In that sense, Manufacturing Dissent is successful as a film, though not in the intended way. It doesn’t fully succeed in trying to make Moore into the anti-Christ of documentary filmmakers, but it does showcase the constructed nature of documentaries itself, this one included. And therein lies the valuable lesson one can take from it, something that Dr Taylor highlighted in the subsequent discussion. Exploring the naiveté of American culture through its unquestioned believe in the Image, Dr Taylor managed to challenge audience expectations and explore underlying problems of the insistence for truth (and if it’s even possible to show the truth and nothing but the truth). Considering the fact that Moore is often seen as the poster child for (US) Democrat agendas, the politically charged background of films in general was showcased by Dr Taylor through Moore himself being caught in the cycle of US elections (Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004, Slacker Uprising in 2008) and how the claim that conservatives don’t know how to make a good film is absurd since they know how to get others to make them for them (just consider who controls the majority of money that goes into film production). The evening was a successful start into the new KAOS Kino Klub season and, thanks to Dr Taylor’s contribution, managed to open quite a few eyes when it comes to film production, the constructed nature of media and the involved politics, as well as the eternal question of content vs entertainment. The KAOS Kino Klub can be found here: KAOS Kino Klub While Dr Alan Taylor can be found here: Kinowords David Mamet quote from On Directing Film, Penguin Books, 1991. Photo: © Annette Seifert |
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