Canadian Social Documentary in the Age of Michael Moore: The Corporation and Fix

Canadian documentary today finds itself in the best and worst of times. There are more films being made than ever and more people--some 14,000 or so--involved in the making of them. The National Film Board, thanks to Commissioner Jacques Bensimon's sweeping reforms, is back from decades of marginalization. Toronto's Hot Docs Festival is on its way to becoming one of the world's premiere documentary showcases. The number of Canadian documentaries being made and the percentage of total Canadian production they represent continues to rise--and is likely to rise further still when recent tax changes in the US and a rising dollar rob Canada of its runaway productions. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] At the same time, there is some question to what is actually being made under the designation of Public subsidies essential for documentary filmmaking are being channeled through broadcasters. The result is that much of the documentary community spends much of its time providing accounts of home makeovers, cooking shows and even less savory manifestations of reality television. Documentary budgets have fallen, on average, by a third and the once proud profession is quickly becoming a very poor one. The good times and bad times of Canadian documentary are taking place amid the re-invention of theatrical, point of view documentary, largely thanks to Michael Moore's demonstration of how profitable this niche can be. It's reality's turn, a point Moore hopes to underline by having his Fahrenheit 9/11 succeed Lord of the Rings as the Academy's Best Picture. In his wake, we are beginning to see a documentary in every Cineplex and an audience for many more documentaries. What's a Canadian to do? Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbot and Joel Bakan's The Corporation and Nettie Wild's Fix: The Story of an Addicted City are two strategies for the documentary in the age of Michael Moore and, not coincidently, two of the most successful Canadian documentaries in recent years. The Corporation is, of the two films, the closest to the Michael Moore school of documentary. This is not to say that the filmmakers are working in a Canadian branch plant of the booming Michael Moore industry. Achbar in particular, established his own style and reputation in 1992 with Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, a film he co-directed with Peter Wintonick and a film that was, until The Corporation, the most widely seen Canadian documentary. Nevertheless, The Corporation benefits from the retro ideal of documentary as rhetorical statement--underlined by the appearance of Moore himself as one of the film's major interview subjects. Based on Joel Bakan's book of the same name, The Corporation follows a rhetorical strategy that is more rigorous and more linear than Moore's. It is divided into three one-hour sections (partially to facilitate its presentation on its two sponsoring channels, TV Ontario and Vision TV). Part one is designed to provide a provocative exposition of the problem. If corporations are legal persons, the filmmakers ask, what sort of persons are they? The film answers that question by showing us in a step-by-step argument that corporations as they exist today neatly fit the World Health Organization's criteria of a psychotic personality. The second part of the film is more forward looking, documenting corporate practices that will make it ever more difficult to extract ourselves from their domination. Part three moves toward solutions. It begins by documenting the collusion between corporations and dictatorial governments, i.e. what we are up against. The film then provides examples of social activism moving from a bloody popular uprising in Bolivia to its least surprising moment, an American town hall meeting where young activists from central casting say the right things. All three parts of the film are divided into sub-sections, each designed to elaborate on a particular point or case study. …

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