Eugene raised the question, "Is F9/11 a doc?" in his blog last night, a debate that I've been having with a lot of my friends down here in Orlando. Most of the F9/11-as-not-a-doc proponants I've talked to describe Moore's film as "propoganda," as if they are expecting a documentary to be "objective" and "comprehensive". If you're looking for objectivity, look to science and mathematics -- filmmaking is never truly objective, and the perspective of the filmmaker is one of the key qualitative componants of a doc. That perspective might seperate a "good doc" from a "bad doc," but it doesn't seperate docs from non-docs. Even nature documentaries inevitibly fail the "objective" test in most cases, as the editor's art is one of selectivity.

Tom Hall threw out a rather good definition ("film that tells a story set in reality, using the actual participants of the events depicted to express the point of view of the artist behind the camera") although one fiction film I was involved in might challenge that description (and has actually played at a couple of documentary festivals even though it's a work of fiction.)

So do I think F9/11 is a documentary? Of course, it's almost a silly question to even pose, even from people who might argue with the film's objectivity or completeness. The people who argue otherwise are really showing what immature media consumers they are -- they probably think news coverage is supposed to be objective as well, or that truth is an absolute. The world is fuzzier than that, and a good documentarian uses their POV on the subject they are covering as means to get their audience to question their own POV and to debate out its assumptions.