By Max Goldberg

WE ALL SHOULD have seen it coming. You can feel the aftershocks while walking down Reel Video's new-release aisle; beyond the perfunctory Fahrenheit 9/11 shelf, a quick scan unveils titles like Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, Uncovered: The War on Iraq, The World According to Bush, Bush Family Fortunes: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Bush's Brain, and Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry peppering the standard fare. If those don't do it for you, perhaps The Corporation, The Hunting of the President, or Control Room will. And if you prefer your polemical pomp projected on the big screen, WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception is in theaters now. Even more than the "Re-defeat Bush" bumper stickers clinging for dear life to Volkswagens and Volvos the nation over, these titles are the most loaded reminders of this election year's fever pitch. As Nov. 2 slopes away and Americans dig in for four more years, one wonders what to make of the innumerable hours documentary filmmakers spent parked at editing stations, determined to dethrone George W. Bush. Earlier in the year, Film Comment ran an interview with leader-of-the-pack Michael Moore titled "The Ending Is Up to You." Months later, the struggle isn't for resolution so much as it is for meaning.

There is, of course, a long tradition of political commentary in American films running all the way from D.W. Griffith's A Corner in Wheat to Roland Emmerich's The Day after Tomorrow. At the height of the studio era, genres like the western, combat film, and social drama allowed filmmakers to navigate the political sphere through complex re-imaginings of archetypal characters and situations. Even political documentaries have something of a history in American cinema. For many, Fahrenheit 9/11 strongly echoed the controversial vision of Peter Davis's 1974 Vietnam War elegy, Hearts and Minds (and those who think the U.S. antiwar documentary was hatched in Vietnam's shadow ought to see John Huston's brutal World War II ode The Battle of San Pietro). Both Moore and Davis dismantle a U.S. military engagement to produce an incisive critique of the society that allows for such misbegotten conflict. Fahrenheit 9/11 is most effective when it resembles Hearts and Minds, quietly allowing the viewer to arrive at the full horror of Americanismo through stark, unapologetic juxtapositions. At one point in Fahrenheit 9/11, the camera pauses on an Iraqi woman, stricken by the wreckage of her former home. Staring down the audience, she curses Bush. The shot is a replication of one in Hearts and Minds wherein a Vietnamese father hoarsely shouts at Richard Nixon. To be sure, the echoing is more commentary than homage; why, Moore seems to wonder, has so little changed in 25 years?

While such reverberations are key to understanding Moore's directorial intentions, there is a fundamental difference in the perspectives of the two films. Hearts and Minds is very much an elegy, mourning a war gone horribly wrong. Davis's critique was (and is) certainly relevant to the film's audience, but it was delivered in a hushed retrospective voice. If Fahrenheit 9/11 seems more urgent and, yes, clumsier than Hearts and Minds, it's because it's a film made in the present tense. As is so often the case, technology's most immediate impact is one of speed; in the case of the digital political documentary, this means shortening the lag time between an event's actual occurrence and its projection on the silver screen from months to weeks, or even days in the case of the below-the-radar Republican National Convention coverage that played at the Roxie Cinema. Part of Fahrenheit 9/11's devastation was its uncanny ability to give us the sense of seeing history written as the events of that history continued to unfold. As I walked out of a Boston cinema screening the film into the summer's twilight, a Democratic National Committee volunteer picked up where Moore left off, asking me, "Would you like to help beat Bush?"

Of course, what was notable about 2004's wave of political documentaries wasn't just that filmmakers were able to create urgent political films, but also that there was such a market for them. Granted, most of these films didn't make much of a dent in nonmetropolitan cinemas, but then, what else is new? It's not as if films like Tarnation and Moolaadé are sweeping through small-town America, so why should we expect more from shoestring outings like Bush's Brain? While Fahrenheit 9/11 made great strides to demonstrate the documentary form's economic viability (continuing last year's trend of documentary successes like Capturing the Friedmans, Spellbound, and Winged Migration), it was the underdogs that really rocked the boat of the independent film industry's system for distribution and exhibition.

Robert Greenwald's duo, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism and Uncovered: The War on Iraq, managed to tap into a fairly extensive audience without the benefit of an established film company's backing. Rather than trying to find a Miramax to fund his film, Greenwald went to an organization (MoveOn.org) that was willing to invest in his political perspective. And sure enough, the audience came running, doing the house-party thing, snatching up the DVD, and, eventually, making for successful runs at art houses and second-run theaters.

In the cases of Outfoxed and Uncovered, an audience rallied out of political allegiance (or rather, disallegiance) as well as dissatisfaction with the mainstream media's coverage of current events. The alternative that many of these films offered was more than just a matter of content. The audience that sat through 2004's political documentaries received a distinctive, human perspective on world events, much as they would from an essay in the New Yorker or the Atlantic. While no one can say that a film like Control Room bears the same sort of auteurist stamp as Fahrenheit 9/11, it still very much represents a personal vision of the political landscape. Beyond the loud muckraking and quiet laments, it's this degree of personalization that makes these films such a profoundly different outlet from the dehumanized and dehumanizing delivery of the mainstream media.

None of this is to say that polemical filmmaking is anything new or that any of these films can be called masterpieces. Indeed, watching these documentaries, one often has the sense that the filmmakers are getting ahead of themselves, too eager to loudly make a point at the expense of nuance or even coherence. That said, the mere fact that these docu-essays were delivered in such timely fashion seems reason enough to keep our eyes open. While audiences didn't discover a fully formed aesthetic in any one installment of the year's political documentary onslaught, the total sum signals a new cinematic landscape wherein filmmakers are able to shape their political perspectives in real time: an interventionist mode of subjective filmmaking. The revolution will not be televised, but, judging by the distribution and exhibition networks established during the election season, it may well be coming to a theater near you.

Top 10

1. Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, USA)

2. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, USA)

3. The Big Red One (Samuel Fuller, USA, 1980)

4. Moolaadé (Ousmane Sembene, Senegal/France)

5. Cowards Bend the Knee (Guy Maddin, Canada)

6. A drunken Rick Danko wailing "Ain't No Cane on the Brazos" in Festival Express (Bob Smeaton, U.K./Netherlands)

7. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, USA)

8. (tie) Control Room (Jehane Noujaim, USA), Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, USA), the return of The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, Algeria/Italy, 1965)

9. Sideways (Alexander Payne, USA)

10. James Wong Howe retrospective at the Castro Theatre: hats off to Anita Monga, Stacey Wisnia, and co.