Our Guest Blogger is Karina Longworth and this post was originally published 12/08/08 on blog.spout.com. It is presented here by permission. You can read Karina’s bio if you have not had the pleasure of meeting her at the end of the post! (Photo credit)

SHOULD DOCUMENTARIES BE HELD TO DIFFERENT CRITICAL STANDARDS THAN FEATURES?

I’m going to go ahead and answer the question I posed in the headline: No. Now, let’s back up a bit…

At Movie City News, Kim Voynar has written a column in which she admits that she has “just not been blown out of the water much by the docs this year”:

Maybe it’s the tightening of the economy overall making it harder for filmmakers to get compelling documentaries made. Maybe we’re just in a cycle of docs not being the preferred flavor of the month again…Many of the docs I saw this year, while they had interesting subject matter, were not what I would consider “theatrical” films. They were films that would have played just as well, or even better, on a television screen.

As you might have guessed, I disagree that this has been a weak year for documentaries. As I wrote last week, many of the most successful nonfiction films of the year have been challenging in form and idiosyncratic in content, and though I’m not cukoo-bananas for all of them, I think the fact that art seems to be trumping artless activism is encouraging. But that is not the aspect of Voynar’s piece that I take issue with. This is the aspect of Voynar’s piece that I take issue with:

She goes on to make a four-point checklist of what she considers to be requirements “for a great theatrical documentary,” and then concludes that only four films on the 2008 Oscar shotlist fit those requirements: The Betrayal, Trouble The Water, Man on Wire, and Encounters at the End of the World. She concludes by offering the four films the following compliment: “All of these films are not only good documentaries, but great filmmaking.” Which implies that a film could be a “good documentary” while not exhibiting “great filmmaking,” which raises a question or three.

Shouldn’t the quality of the filmmaking be of primary concern, regardless of whether or not the film itself qualifies as a documentary? What good could come from a critic systematically holding one genre of film to a different standard than all others? If we’re going to make guidelines for the evaluation of documentaries, should we also do it for animation, or for foreign films, or for all those Zooey Deschanel films that premiere at Sundance and then disappear off the face of the planet? Where does it all end?

The sheer fact that such a system of evaluation special to docs exists is, I think, possibly endemic of a larger problem. That documentaries are ghettoized by film festivals is one thing, but that attitude more often than not extends to the way nonfiction films are approached by the media. Last month, Toronto documentary programmer Thom Powers issued a call for a new breed of documentary critics who would, in part, “ignore the way most periodicals divide their reviews by formats of theatrical, television and DVD [because] these boundaries prevent meaningful connections.” Citing the influence of Andrew Sarris, Clement Greenberg and Lester Bangs on their individual frames of reference, Powers urgently wondered, “Where is the equivalent voice for today’s documentary scene?” The answer might be that many of those potential voices are hung up making the distinctions which Powers warns against.

Who is Karina Longworth?

Karina Longworth is proud to be one of those unwashed, basement-dwelling bloggers that Peter Bart is always on about. In 2005, she co-founded the film blog Cinematical, whilst simultaneously finishing her Masters degree in Cinema Studies, and working at a pasta factory to pay the rent. Karina has also written about film, new media and popular culture for a variety of sites and print publications, including The Huffington Post, NewTeeVee, Netscape, TV Squad, and FILMMAKER Magazine. The high point of her career thus far? The time at Sundance when Roger Ebert gave her the fleece vest off his back. The low point? The time she spilled a negroni on Huey Lewis. Karina started writing about movies because she couldn’t find books that answered her burning questions. Questions like, “Has there ever been anything creepier than the scene where they reanimate Boris Karloff in ‘The Walking Dead?” And, “Since ‘Back to the Future 2′ was set in 2015, isn’t there still time for the fax machine to make a comeback?” Karina hopes to answer these questions–and additional, hopefully more intelligent queries–right here on SpoutBlog.

Photo Credit — The photo of Karina at the closing party for the New York Film Festival this year is by “muckster” for the 46th New York Film Festival and is reprinted here under the Creative Commons license.