Who or what is being documented? Recent years have seen the rise of a genre of commercial film that seeks to exempt itself from the hyperreal devastation wrecked by endless action films, pornographised sentiment and the tyranny of celebrity. The contemporary feature-length documentary – Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 and Morgan Spurlock's Supersize Me – prides and markets itself in direct opposition to the overblown, the fictional and the conventionally desirable. The contemporary documentary presents us instead with a model of a downbeat, affable bearer of truth (the dude who happens to stumble upon a conspiracy), accompanied by an unswerving and admirable commitment to 'doing the right thing', letting the little guy or gal know how his or her tax payments, votes or leisure time get chewed up and converted into evil. One can even (or especially) be an overweight man in a baseball cap, each t-shirt cruddier than the last, and pull off this trick: the moral of the relationship between conventional cinema and contemporary documentary is that we like our lies beautiful and our truths as dowdy as humanly possible.



Similarly, we don't like our revelations to be too serious: between Morgan Spurlock shoving an excessive quantity of fries in his mouth in the name of research to the transcendental silliness of the hybrid genre of the Mockumentary (This is Spinal Tap, The Office, Borat), the role of the 'document' in both cases is primarily to entertain, and secondarily, in the case of the 'real' documentary, to inform (hopefully). Perhaps Al Gore's film is the exception to this idea, being both pedagogical and morally serious in tone, but in a historical sense he's the classic jester: by winning the popular vote but 'losing' the election, Gore is excluded from the court but perfectly placed to darkly remind the world the truth of its deranged drive towards extinction.



All of these recent, and very successful, efforts have at their core a certain very strong model of verisimilitude: the documentary is a mass, populist cultural form capable of informing as many people as possible that they are being lied to, that all is not well in the world, and that they too can 'do something'. This is an audacious and deliberately naïve model of cinema, far removed from the 'it's just a film' mantra so beloved of many of those involved in the production and promotion of contemporary cinematic product. When Fahrenheit 9/11 was broadcast on several networks (though not as many as had been hoped for) just before the 2004 US election, the sincere motivation was the idea that this film could prevent Bush's re-election, that there could be a direct relation between the truth claims of the film and the behaviour of its audience: rarely has cinema (at least in recent years) regarded itself as potentially so dangerous or as so historically important.



But it is hard not to wonder whether there could be a problem here, not merely on the basis of the fact that Moore's screening 'failed' in its objective of removing Bush from office, but also in the model of reality at the heart of this model of the documentary. The incorrect, cynical, move at this point, however, would be to 'okay, documentary film doesn't work. The facts aren't enough. Either audiences are so corrupted by competing film product that they can no longer accept that this refers to something real, or they're too stupid to make the link between the evidence and their own behaviour'. A much better question, and a much more pressing one to ask would be the one posed by Chris Marker, not in his own voice, of course, but by his own strange formulation of the question of the documentary in films such as A Grin Without a Cat. This film too, is 'real', composed solely (minus the clips from Eisenstein at the start) of footage from actual events, interviews with real people, images from real, often extremely violent and brutal occurrences, but there's no funny guy leading us through it, no underdog tripping over the truth and passing it on to the otherwise-confused audience, as politically in the dark as they are when they sit in the cinema to watch it. Instead we hear a multitude of voices, quotations from unknown sources, personal reflections on the events depicted, oddly dislocated accounts of spectacles.



As K-Punk puts it:

Marker's aim is not to render the period from 67 to 77 as Objective History to be pontificated upon by 'experts' for whom the Meaning of the events is already established, nor, even worse, to produce a vanguardist version of I Heart 1968, in which sighing former revolutionaries look back on anger with the tender contempt of contemporary 'wisdom'. No, the point was to present the events 'in becoming', to restore to them a subjectivity (in the Kierkegaardian sense) that retrospection structurally forecloses.



Marker's almost dispassionate approach, the apparent absence of his authorial control paradoxically creates an overwhelmingly coherent narrative, just as the authorless voices, as disparate as they are, converge on a single thesis: The birth of the New Left coincides with the birth of the New Right, bringing with it all the destruction of the old world, as well as novel and competing attempts to seize control of whatever reality after the dust has cleared (and it remains unclear whether it has). Marker's claim, as exactly encouraging as it is depressing, need not be spelled out by the director himself, as it is etched into every second of every piece of footage. Marker succeeds precisely at the level of form, where others are looking to content for solutions: the oneiric and abstract electronic soundtrack, and the patch-work effect of piecing together film clips with all the varying quality, filters and colours that entails simultaneously invokes the idea both that reality is nothing 'standing behind' individual events… and that it is there for the taking.