Michael Moore names his favourite documentaries
In the early years of the 21st century, Michael Moore was arguably the single most well-known documentarian working in cinema, with his incendiary examinations on modern American society having a global reach that also made him one of the medium’s most commercially successful proponents.
He may have been well over a decade into his filmmaking career at the time, but Bowling for Columbine‘s exploration of the circumstances behind the tragic school shooting put him on the map, with the provocative insight into gun culture recouping its budget more than a dozen times over at the box office and winning him an Academy Award for ‘Best Documentary Feature’.
His follow-up Fahrenheit 9/11 cast a critical eye over the early years of the George W. Bush administration and the War on Terror, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and became the highest-grossing documentary ever released in cinemas in the United States, generating intense reactions and wide-ranging controversies over its perceived accuracy, or lack thereof.
With Sicko shining a light on the broken healthcare system, Slacker Uprising diving into the apathy towards electoral voting in the younger generation, Capitalism: A Love Story focusing on the financial collapse of the late 2000s and Fahrenheit 11/9 zeroing in on the Donald Trump years, it’s not a surprise that a politically-charged documentary would be among Moore’s favourite movies.
1974’s Hearts and Minds used the rhetoric of then-president Lyndon B. Johnson as the backdrop to a scathing assessment of the Vietnam War, which had caused major schisms in the American population. It may have won an Oscar, but not everybody was overjoyed at cinema being so brazen in putting its opinions across, although Moore was suitably won over. “It is the definitive account of the debacle we know as the Vietnam War,” he told NPR. “This film is so well constructed, so emotional, so brilliantly put together, so many great moments.”
Consumer culture at large hasn’t been something Moore has dabbled in to an overt extent, but he was nonetheless left blown away by 2004’s Czech Dream, which found creators Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda orchestrating an elaborate and massive-scale hoax to underline how easily swayed the citizens of the Czech Republic had become by the promise of rampant commercialisation.
For their graduate project at film school, Remunda and Klusák invented an entirely fake hypermarket and mounted a huge advertising campaign to skewer just how heavily their native Czech Republic had fallen victim to marketing bombardments. When 3,000 people turned up to the grand opening of a store that didn’t exist, it was clear they’d made their point, but at least they managed to escape unharmed after some attendees didn’t appreciate the ruse for being the inspired takedown on consumer culture it proved to be.
A decidedly modern undertaking, then, but Moore’s final favourite documentary is anything but. In fact, it took a while after its 1929 premiere for the film to gain the attention it deserved, but Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera is now lauded as one of the greatest and most important to ever be captured on celluloid.
Beyond its focus on the perceived mundanities of everyday life, Man with a Movie Camera featured countless pioneering techniques to add plenty of style to the substance, with slow motion, freeze frames, match cuts, split screens, and many more being used to elevate it far beyond the realms of mere documentary and into a class of its own as a genuine cinematic trailblazer.
Michael Moore’s favourite documentaries:
- Hearts and Minds (Peter Davis, 1974)
- Czech Dream (Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda, 2004)
- Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
