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IT HAS BEEN said that documentaries perform two basic complementary functions: either they take unfamiliar subjects and through detailed exposure render them obvious, familiar, or they address what is ostensibly commonplace from a perspective that makes it appear strange, unfamiliar. Visual ethnography, science docs, and travelogues comprise the former category; social-issue tracts and portraiture fall into the latter. Another axiom suggests that the way to tell a good documentar from a less good one is whether the audience winds up having fewer vexing questions about what transpired on screen - about the topic or content - than it is does about how the content made it to the screen; that is, under what conditions or principles of organization the film was shot or edited. And there are plenty of instances in which the most mysterious or intriguing element of a nonfiction film is what went on behind the scenes. This does not mean that all good documentaries need to be reflexive, to display or clarify their working methods, but it does mean that their "backstories" shouldn't block or betray our understanding of the issues presented. (Recall the controversy around the juggling of time frames in the 1989 Roger & Me.)
To apply either of these generalizations too literally would flatten out a varied and complex area of cinema. Nonetheless, regarded in tandem they signal something important about a challenging group of recent films focused on the business of public voyeurism, media celebrity, and the political economy of imagemaking.
We seem to have a limitless thirst for the "real thing" these days, in book publishing, pop music, and especially network television O.J., Oprah, and "60 Minutes," to name three points on a wide compass. With this somewhere near the forefront of the filmmaker's mind, such efforts as Nick Broomfield's Heidi Fleiss:
Hollwou,wood Madam (95), Ross McElwee's Six O'Clock News (96), and Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's Paradise Lost: The Child llurders at Robin Hood Hills (96) have nudged the normally austere, marginalized precinct of independent documentary closer to the glare of tabloid journalism. In the process, they are revising formal options and ethical practices long associated with the so-called factual film. What these films share, along with a fascination for the bizarre and sensational, is a...