We?re Living in a Golden Age of Documentary Filmmaking

But while those nominations should be applauded, they hardly amount to an adequate or accurate appraisal of all that makes this a golden era in documentary film. Five years ago, filmmakers AJ Schnack and Thom Powers started the Cinema Eye Honors to acknowledge and celebrate the art of the documentary, handing out awards to nonfiction producers, directors, editors, composers, and cinematographers.* Outside of a few wayward and tipsy presenters, there?s nothing really subversive about Cinema Eye. What?s surprising is that it took so long to acknowledge how documentaries actually work: Someone makes choices about how to shoot a film, and someone else constructs a narrative out of the footage. Perhaps to some degree we?re uncomfortable, as a culture, with the fact that documentaries do require artistry, that there?s an indeterminate gap between hard fact and presentation. Maybe not consistently, since we?re also a culture that subsists on pseudo-factual reality TV. But when the time comes to honor and elevate a documentary, we seem to want reassurance that it?s all true, all above board. Tell me a story but try to tell it straight, make me feel but don?t make me think about how I?m feeling, give me the facts without calling the facts into question. Whatsits like Exit Through the Gift Shop might sneak through with a nomination, but strident, morally unambiguous titles like Inside Job and The Cove tend to prevail in the end. When Errol Morris finally won an Oscar in 2004 (it was also his first nomination), it was for Fog of War, a relatively sober and straightforward portrait within a filmography defined by eccentrics and boldly aestheticized re-enactments. Two superior and knottier films have followed, Standard Operating Procedure and Tabloid, and they?ve been ignored by the Academy.?

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