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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35012 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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I love good documentaries and wish I could find better recommendations, but I am inherently suspicious of how rigorous the fact-checking process is for the average documentary. I stopped watching documentaries because I just don't trust them at baseline, and I don't really have the time/energy to waste on ones that don't meet the threshold. I've been complaining about this since at least 2019:

An example of a documentary I hated was "Whose Streets?" (2017) even though I'm an avid black lives matter supporter. The documentary had a string of random people being interviewed and making all these wild assertions in their living room with no indication whatsoever that any of it was verified or fact-checked. It was so fucking frustrating to watch I gave up after only a few minutes. Of course, it fucking has 98% on RT.

So question for you Mr. Dog but also to everyone, what heuristics do you use to find compelling documentaries that retain factual grounding?

Right, the boom in and trendiness of dramatized true crime, which blends fiction and fashion with the facts, makes one more suspicious than ever. Netflix in particular seems to be running away with this genre.

Yeah - documentaries are almost always intentionally designed for casual fun-watchers, as opposed to 'professional history book / journal article readers who will look for and criticize flaws', so they're rarely careful, and either make no novel claims or make wrong novel claims.

Ooh, good question! As a first pass, I enjoy documentaries that are more anthropological (or “Herodotean”) in style — letting people speak for themselves without necessarily endorsing their message or pushing a heavy-handed agenda. I find Adam Curtis’s stuff quite frustrating for this reason, because it’s so clearly trying to push a narrative with clever editing and commentary (a good parody here of his style). I enjoyed Empire of Dust because it wasn’t clear to me exactly what the message was; or rather, it was up to the viewer to define it. Obviously there’s still an inevitable editorial slant via editing etc. but it wasn’t obvious what it was. I also enjoyed (or was impressed by) The Act of Killing for this reason. In that case the message was maybe clearer, but it was still conveyed largely by letting people damnify themselves in their own words.

That parody is absolutely brilliant. Did you mean to link to that particular timestamp?

Oh no, whoops! Will fix it now.

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