Shame on You, Michael Moore

Moore is, in short, a documentary filmmaker who makes fictional documentaries. That’s right, fictional documentaries; it’s a pretty well-established genre, with some especially good work done by Dziga Vertov in the Soviet Union and Leni Reifenstahl in Germany. Granted, it might be saying something that they were working under Stalin and Hitler, respectively, but I digress. Moore, from his initial film, Roger and Me, to his most recent, Bowling for Columbine, has repeatedly misrepresented events and chronologies, baldly edited speeches and conversations to produce his desired effect, lied pathologically in his narrations, and, at times, has outright staged scenes for better cinematic effect. Since Bowling for Columbine won an Oscar this year for best documentary, let’s take a quick look at some of his more vagrantly disgraceful documentary techniques with which Moore uses to gleefully piss on the memories of those shot on that day…