By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Fires were started: Is POV NSG for docs?
Doing some research before talking to the director of Who Killed The Electric Car?, I discovered that I had been contaminated by “docu-ganda” and was sternly advised to keep my brain open while witnessing such chuff, 
or at least the Christian Science Monitor’s staff writer, Daniel B. Wood would caution us to be verrrrry skeptical: “In An Inconvenient Truth… former Vice President Al Gore asserts that global warming may soon eliminate one of the world’s great natural vistas: the snows of Africa’s Mt. Kilimanjaro.” In “Who Killed the Electric Car? celebrities such as Mel Gibson and Ed Begley Jr. lament the “murder” of General Motor’s EV1 electric car and the loss of California’s “most radical smog-fighting mandate since the catalytic converter.” (Slanting his case with an understated sneer at “celebrities” by the end of the first graf, Mr. Wood fails to footnote that celebrities were among the few consumers who could lease the cars, as they could yell louder than most if they were denied the chance.) “All deliver on the promise to tell an “untold” story, but is theirs the full story? Or even the true story? Don’t count on it, say media experts.” Ah! Media Experts! From the carrels of academe and public relations, curry their contributions! “The days when “documentary” reliably meant “inform the audience” – rather than “influence the audience” – are no more. The makers of such films today see their cinematic contributions as an antidote to media consolidation that, they say, restricts topics and voices to the bland and the commercial. 
As such, they feel little or no obligation to heed documentary-film traditions like point-by-point rebuttal or formal reality checks. “We need to clarify that this new wave of ‘documentaries’ are not, in fact, documentaries,” says Christopher Ian Bennett of New School Media, a communications and public-relations firm in Vancouver. “They fail to meet the Oxford Dictionary definition, in that they editorialize, and opine far too much. They are entertaining…. But they can be dangerous if viewers take everything they are saying as the whole truth.” [Mr. Bennett is also a principal at Gryphon Television, whose site asserts “An evolving financial world needs new financial media… Gryphon Television is where Main Street and Wall Street connect; “New School Media” apparently lacks a website. An egregious bit of what somewhat resembles bought-and-paid-for pr hagiography makes amusing reading. An excellent timeline of the development of documentary form is here. The essential, complete Oxford English Dictionary does not contain Mr. Bennett’s definition for documentary, but rather, “of the nature of or consisting in documents; affording evidence, evidential; relating to teacher or instruction.” It’s in the same volume with drudgery, “The occupation of a drudge; mean or servile labour; wearismone toil; dull or distasteful work.” Hey, somebody’s gotta draw a paycheck for condescending to the intelligence of readers (and viewers).]
