My colleague Peter Galison and I are currently making a documentary about government secrecy. (Scheduled release is January, 2008.) While an important topic, it is in many ways a terrible idea for a film. Nobody wants to speak with you. There is nothing to see. Unlike other kinds of secrecy, U.S. government secrecy carries with it an enormous infrastructure designed to keep the uninitiated out. Clearances, the need to know and the fearful imperative of national security align themselves against inquiry. How do we penetrate this world? What is there to film in any case? What kinds of visual invention are permissible? How do we verify what people say? Indeed, how will we know what we don't know?

Increasingly, we live in a world of competing realities. When half the electorate cannot imagine what the other half are thinking and academic institutions struggle with what an educated person ought to study, documentary features are drawing audiences to movie theatres in numbers not seen in North America since the silent era. Some are political, like Michael Moore's Sicko, or Errol Morris' Fog of War, others are about penguins, dysfunctional childhoods, tobacco farming, sex crimes. While diverse in content, they are marked by the authorial interventions of individuals obsessed with their subjects. We have developed an appetite for the "real," and more, a wish to satisfy this appetite by going to the movies. While not making filmmakers rich, the bottom-line logic of the marketplace means these independent films are making somebody enough money for the phenomenon to exist and, perhaps, continue. It is a heady time for documentary, though one not without risks.

Part of the genius of capitalism is its ability to co-opt innovative and dissenting forms, transforming them into corporate profit. Not a new thought, but one that is useful to consider during this privileged documentary moment. Early direct cinema's shaky camera continues to be imitated by cop shows (NYPD Blue comes to mind) and advertisers (Guess Jeans) to signify a certain funky authenticity. Immediate gratification in the marketplace means that jeans that were once bought new and worn until they faded and threadbare are now purchased pre-aged. By packaging documentary film's ability to have us powerfully identify with "real" people, reality television is making buckets of money by throwing non-actors into grotesque gladiator-like situations where they are motivated to flirt, eat bugs, sing, dance, fall in love or win the admiration of a megalomaniac for the weekly enjoyment of millions of viewers. As soon as populist phenomena appear, corporations initiate strategies for creating and marketing the phenomena as their own.

Continued...

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