DVD Chronicle

We are living in an era of significant documentary films. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, whatever one thinks about the merits of its filmmaking or indeed the issue of climate change, is unquestionably a powerfully influential work of advocacy, as are Michael Moore's films, even if in his case advocacy seems less on the agenda than provocation. In the study of American history, essential aspects of our national experience have in the last few years been caught definitively on film—by Ken Burns, most notably, in his series on the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement, and baseball— and brought into a lot of American living rooms. The stories Burns tells have always been available in libraries or photo archives, of course, but he has brought them down from the dusty shelves and made them visible and audible: the eloquence of soldiers writing home from Gettysburg or Antietam, the desolation of corpses strewn across photographed battlefields. Burns has had many followers, some tending toward history, some toward current events, and thanks to funding from foundations, HBO, and PBS (in the program "Independent Lens," for instance) their films are being more and more widely seen. To pick one young filmmaker from among many, Cynthia Wade has had notable success with her documentaries, which are conspicuously well-made, current-event-focused, and often on heart-tugging topics. Her film Freeheld, about the struggles of a dying New Jersey police detective to leave her pension benefits to her life partner, won the Academy Award for documentary short in 2007. You should be on the lookout for Wade's current project, Mondays at Racine, which will follow women who have lost their hair to chemotherapy as they find wigs and comfort in a Long Island salon that caters especially to them, pro bono, one Monday a month.

Has film now become the dominant informational medium of our time, threatening to supplant print? The question seems unavoidable at a time when a video news story often leads the front page of the online edition of The New York Times, when sequences shot on smartphones by amateur photojournalists in Tahrir Square go quickly viral on the Internet, influencing everyone's understanding of the Arab Spring, and when a figure like Charles Ferguson decides to address so complex an issue as the financial meltdown of 2008 in a documentary film, Inside Job, which he wrote, produced, and directed, and which won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2011.

Inside Job uses the techniques of film, for instance, clever animated graphics like moving arrows and boxes outlined in color, to explain exactly what happened to the banks and to the governments forced to come to their aid. Like many others I now have a surer grasp of credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations than I did before seeing the film. But explanations might have been provided with equal cleverness in a book, magazine article, or website. What Ferguson's film does that these media cannot do, or cannot do so dramatically and quickly, is convey a visual understanding: the essence of a worldwide catastrophe photographed in a shot of unmoving, not-at-work cranes posed against the sky. When Ferguson considers the phenomenon of legislators taking up a second career as lobbyists, or of regulators leaving the Federal government to become highly paid employees in the industries they used to regulate, he simply puts...