For the first time in a decade or more, the frenzy caused when 5,000 film and showbiz journalists gathered in Cannes this May had some substance to it. Usually the big story is that Madonna wore a basque to a screening or that Lars von Trier fell out with Bj?rk. But in 2004, unathletic critics were sprinting up the steps of the Palais du Festival to see a serious documentary with no stars in it.
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 has already stacked up the column inches. His apparent hubris has been dissected, but his new work's innovations as a film, and its potential effect on the film industry, have been overlooked.
Its first innovation is based on one of the oldest tricks in the journalistic book: the "fine-toothed comb" rule. We have all seen the footage of George W Bush in a classroom as he is told of the attacks on the World Trade Centre. You would think that nothing more could be gleaned from these moments of video, but Moore's researchers discovered something in the material which produced an audible gasp at the Cannes screening. Dazed, Bush scans around him and spies a children's book about a goat. He starts reading. Moore's commentary gives Bush the benefit of the doubt, at first: maybe he's just doing something with his hands as he processes the problem. But the president keeps reading, apparently engaged by the tribulations of the goat in question. Moore puts a clock on the screen to count the time. For seven full minutes, Bush reads this children's book.
For ironist or journalist alike, this is a real coup de cin?ma. Moore's adroit use of such moments begs the question of why the US networks, who shot this footage and must have noticed Bush's prevarication, didn't use it.
And his eye catches other telling moments. The photographs from Abu Ghraib emerged as he was editing, but Moore had something more. With crews in the field, he sought out details such as a drunk Arab who falls asleep in the sun, under a blanket, and gets an erection. US soldiers see it and touch it, handling it like a joystick. A single incident in the flow of many, but cinema can capture such indicators of disrespect, and concretise them.
In an equally disturbing vein, Moore has his reporters quiz US troops on what it was like being in the tanks as they went into battle. Several describe how they were able to wire their CD players into the helmet talkback system inside the tanks. They describe excitedly how they played, at full blast, a heavy metal track by a group called the Bloodhound Gang containing the lyric, "Burn motherfucker burn," as they raced towards Iraqi cities. The bleak poetic point is that armies have always used battlecries, and popular music has produced much that is suitably aggressive and reactionary.
Moore's longish pre-title sequence describes the relationship between the Bushes and the Saudis in the years and months before the attack. In his account, Moore brings us to the morning of 9/11, then runs the title sequence of his film and only after that does he present the most graceful sequence in the whole film. He plays the sound of the planes crashing into the twin towers and the screams of shock on Manhattan's streets, but over an entirely black screen. We don't need to see the images because, of course, they are burned into our minds. This is a simple but remarkably effective cinematic idea which should influence the portrayal of that day hereafter.
As cinema, Fahrenheit 9/11 breaks some new ground. It also looks like it might bring about some changes in the film industry. The first is, with reservations, a good one. As I write, the trade press are announcing that Moore's film will be the first theatrical feature to be released in the middle east. There have been many great non-fiction films about this region—Borhane Alaouie's outstanding Kafr Kassem (Lebanon, 1974), which depicts an Israeli massacre of Arabs in 1956, is the first that comes to mind; but these are never shown in cinemas there. Since Moore is careful to show not only liberals who oppose the war in Iraq but also middle-American Republicans and families closely associated to the military, this might challenge the opinion of audiences in the United Arab Emirates, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Qatar that Amrika is monolithically supportive of Bush.
The second implication for the film world is that Fahrenheit 9/11 could bring about the sale of its production company, Miramax. There has long been tension between Miramax and Disney, who acquired the distributor-producer in 1993, but the New York Times reported recently that Disney boss Michael Eisner has been talking of a sale because of the "accumulated aggravation" he felt at Miramax co-chairmen Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Fahrenheit 9/11 might just provide the final push.
Though Miramax has released many sentimental and po-faced literary films over the years, it helped to lift the studios out of their 1980s obsession with teenagers. It created a middlebrow in US cinema whose lasting value has been to pave the way for the country's more innovative, intelligent directors. Anything which shakes the foundation of the company could have a negative knock-on for mature American filmmaking, which would be just one of the ironies of Moore's film. It already looks like a landmark in documentary history.
