ABSTRACT
Fahrenheit 9/11, by Michael Moore, represents a watershed in documentary film history. Other areas of the media, particularly news broadcasts on television, have softened their approach to the news. They, too, have adopted “entertainment” values. Simultaneously, TV drama and a segment of the feature film industry have adopted “information-documentary” values: witness reality TV and the rise of a documentary approach on shows such as Law and Order and the CSI series. Dziga Vertov’s represents the classic cinéma vérité sensibility that reemerges in direct cinema in England, in the candid eye series in Canada, and in the American work of Frederick Wiseman and the Maysles brothers. But other visions of documentary emanated from the work of Robert Flaherty and John Grierson, working in the same era as Vertov. Jeffrey Blitz’s documentary Spellbound has launched two dramatic films and a Broadway musical. Rarely has a documentary spawned as much emulation.
