Truth, Moore or less

In George Orwell’s dystopian classic “1984,” a disembodied voice transmits streams of government-generated information from a surveillance apparatus that can never be turned off and allows the Thought Police to keep close tabs on the populace. From his window, the novel’s doomed hero, Winston Smith, can see the three slogans of the ruling party -- “War Is Peace,” “Freedom Is Slavery,” “Ignorance Is Strength” -- emblazoned on the cruelly named Ministry of Truth. Everywhere he turns, Big Brother keeps watch.

In Orwell’s novel, power begets reality begets truth. The “Party” dictates not just how individuals live and love, but how they perceive the world. In this world, reality isn’t simply there -- a truth that can be grasped by an individual consciousness -- it’s there because the Party says it’s there, again and again. Repeated enough and with enough pressure, the Party’s propaganda becomes Winston’s reality and, finally, his truth. In Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” -- the title is borrowed from Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel “Fahrenheit 451” -- the filmmaker argues that the Bush administration has become an Orwellian nightmare, a wellspring of Newspeak, a ministry of fear.

For many moviegoers, the veracity of Moore’s take on the Bush administration will largely depend on their political bent. For others, however, the film’s effectiveness may ironically hinge on its effectiveness as propaganda. The propaganda label may displease Moore partisans (a fierce lot, in my experience), who may be loath to admit that this subjective, unapologetically left-leaning film is anything less than objectively true. That’s too bad because whatever else it accomplishes, “Fahrenheit 9/11” raises fascinating questions about propaganda and documentary, suggesting that the divide between the two is not always as vast as filmmakers and audiences sometimes imagine.

The word propaganda originated in the 17th century with a committee of Catholic cardinals that oversaw foreign missions -- congregatio de propaganda fide or congregation for propagating the faith. Since then the word has come to mean the systematic promotion of specific ideas and images to either advance your cause or damage that of an opponent. By this definition, propaganda includes: Dziga Vertov’s Soviet-funded ode to filmmaking and revolutionary ideals, “The Man With a Movie Camera” (1929); Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi-commissioned panegyric to Adolf Hitler, “Triumph of the Will” (1935); Emile de Antonio’s chronicle of the Vietnam War, “In the Year of the Pig” (1969); the right-wing video “The Clinton Chronicles” (1994) -- along with World War II-era U.S. government-produced films, federally funded anti-drug commercials and that sex-education short that freaked you out in school.

Vertov wasn’t the first filmmaker to bend filmed documents to instrumental ends. In 1897, Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton traveled from New York City to Cuba to record the Spanish-American War. They shot a lot of footage, but somehow missed the pivotal Battle of Santiago Bay. Smith later explained how he and Blackton used photographic cutouts of American and Spanish ships, billows of cigar and cigarette smoke and dashes of gunpowder to re-create the missing battle. They then edited this sleight of hand in with their existing footage and unleashed the subterfuge in two separate films. “Almost every newspaper in New York,” wrote Smith, “carried an account of the showings, commenting on Vitagraph’s remarkable feat in obtaining on-the-spot pictures of these two historic events.”

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The art form matures

In the century to follow, documentary filmmakers continued to shape the truth through a variety of styles and with an even wider range of intentions. In the early 1920s, Robert Flaherty transformed an Inuit named Nanook into an icon of Natural Man by turning a cut-away igloo into a stage. Three years after Riefenstahl helped spit-shine Hitler’s public image, Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens watched fascist planes bomb Spanish civilians, an event he and cameraman John Ferno caught on film for the 1937 anti-fascist documentary “The Spanish Earth.” Ivens later added the sound of broken glass to the soundtrack and “the slight crunching of it” to accompany the image of two children killed by Nazi artillery in Madrid. (“Fortune” magazine editor Archibald MacLeish helped raise the funds; Ernest Hemingway wrote and recited the narration.)

The introduction of lightweight cameras and sound recorders in the early 1960s changed documentary, introducing a new approach called cinema verite. Known in somewhat different form as direct cinema in the U.S. and Canada, and observational cinema in Britain, the method introduced a new host of ethical questions because of its nominal transparency. Yet as in Flaherty’s time, everything still depended on who held the camera and why, whether the filmmakers revealed their intentions, and how the footage was edited. Writing about one of his early documentaries, the direct-cinema classic “Primary” (1960), Richard Leacock declared, “we made a film that captured the flavor, the guts of what was happening. No interviews. No re-enactments ... We were in fact developing a new grammar which was entirely different from that of silent filmmaking and of fiction filmmaking.”

From the 1960s through the 1970s, direct cinema became a dominant documentary style in the U.S., epitomized by the likes of Leacock, Albert Maysles and his late brother, David (“Grey Gardens”), D.A. Pennebaker (“The War Room”) and the brilliant Frederick Wiseman (“Hospital”). Loosely, direct cinema’s method of “fly on the wall” filmmaking is defined by hand-held cinematography, synchronous sound and a sense of immediacy and intimacy. That feeling of intimacy made direct cinema perfect for television, a principal funding source and a primary distribution channel. In 1973, TV viewers received a big, bitter taste of this style with the PBS series “An American Family,” which introduced us to a Santa Barbara family, the Louds, that was falling apart at the seams.

Since then, wobbly camera work and a sense that “you are there” filmmaking have become pop culture cliches, most evident now in the unending tsunami of so-called reality television shows. When Leacock declared that he and his fellow documentarists were developing a new film grammar it’s unlikely he imagined that their radical innovations would eventually spawn bread-and-circus entertainments such as “Survivor,” “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and the nitwit adventures of Paris Hilton. The rise of reality TV hasn’t wholly undermined the ideals and integrity of the direct cinema pioneers. But the fact that direct cinema’s “grammar,” or more accurately its cliches, have been successfully co-opted by the entertainment industry does suggest that documentary’s fly on the wall has become a fly in the ointment.

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The air of authenticity

ONE of the hallmarks of direct cinema (the real stuff, not Paris Hilton) is that it obscures its artifice and promotes a sense of objectivity. In the mid-1960s, David Maysles admitted “there is no such thing as being strictly objective in anything that is at all artistic. The objectivity is just a personal integrity.” De Antonio, a Marxist who disdained direct cinema, put it more succinctly: “With any cut at all, objectivity fades away.” In the years since, in part because of the overlap between documentary film and broadcast journalism, documentaries have come to enjoy a privileged position vis-a-vis “the truth.” Pure direct cinema has become uncommon -- these days, most docs are a hybrid of styles and techniques -- but the idea that “what you see is what you get” when you watch a documentary remains intact, almost inviolate.

Enter Michael Moore -- cameras, politics and mouth blazing. In 1989, Moore crashed the somnolent U.S. documentary scene with “Roger & Me,” a satirical look at General Motors and its effect on the filmmaker’s hometown of Flint, Mich. The documentary and its makers became critical lighting rods, even for liberals -- Pauline Kael and Film Comment raked Moore over the coals -- but it was a box office sensation. More hit movies and bestselling books followed, transforming Moore into the most famous leftist in the country and a populist star, albeit one who lives in a reported $1-million-plus New York City pad. And, whether by coincidence or design, a swell of politically partisan documentaries followed in Moore’s agit-doc wake, typified recently by “Super Size Me,” “The Corporation” and “The Hunting of the President.”

To a large extent what makes Moore such a contentious figure for conservatives and liberals alike -- beyond the not-insignificant fact that he’s a leftist -- is that he doesn’t hide his politics under a cloak of objectivity. He’s a polemicist, a master at agitprop, a three-ring circus of one. True, he makes mistakes -- though seemingly less in “Fahrenheit 9/11” than in his last feature, “Bowling for Columbine” -- but so does everyone with a pulse. More to the point, Moore doesn’t claim to be a journalist. Even so, ever since the release of “Roger & Me” he has often been held to a higher standard of truth than most documentary filmmakers or even journalists. Few documentaries are subjected to as rigorous scrutiny, much less the tsk-tsking of film critics and pundits.

For the most part, Moore drives conservatives crazy because they hate what he says; he drives liberals crazy too, though often because of the way he says it. Loud, pushy, a shameless showboat and master of the cheap shot, he combines the muckraker’s outrage with the aw-shucks hokum of a Will Rogers. He targets those on the political right, but he also goes after the media, Democratic politicians and the country’s economic system. (He also thinks recycling is dumb.) In “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Moore attempts to show how meaning is manufactured, where money flows and how power functions, using propaganda to fight propaganda. He points fingers in many directions and if like the Scarecrow in “The Wizard of Oz” he sometimes points in two directions at once, there’s no mistaking the ferocity of his convictions.

Moore closes “Fahrenheit 9/11” with some lines from a section in “1984” titled “War Is Peace.” “The war,” Moore says in a voice drained of its familiar jocular irony, “is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.” Orwell wrote his novel in the shadow of World War II in reaction to Nazi and Stalinist state terror, prompting psychologist Erich Fromm to describe it as “an expression of a mood” and a warning. It was also a declaration of conscience and a great work of art. “Fahrenheit 9/11” is hardly equal to the novel on the level of art, but there’s no doubt it is its equal in political passion.

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Manohla Dargis is a Times film critic. Responses can be e-mailed to calendar@latimes.com.