Kate | Slininger

For the most part, documentaries address and entertain educated middle and upper-middle class audiences - audiences who come to documentary cinema to learn about the world and, perhaps, to get fired up about something. Liberal documentaries end up confirming and making comfortable the class status of that audience by providing opportunities for compassion, for uplift, for hope, for self-satisfactions, and perhaps, for complacency. There is nothing to learn about our activities or ourselves here. There is everything to learn about the other. We and they are not linked other than by feelings, such as caring, concern, and sometimes outrage. But the connections or links are momentary. We leave the theater filled with our best feelings about ourselves. The next day we go about the same business in the same way. This produces desire for a better and fairer world, but not the useful self-knowledge required to change anything. It offers no structural analysis of the problems described, and rarely proposes solutions. When it does not indicate where hope may lie, it usually suggests new legislation for new social programs, something over which we have only the illusion of control. It never implicates the class activities of its audience as central contributors to the situation depicted in the film.