In Praise Of... Documentaries

Reality gives cinema power. The train filmed arriving at a French station by the Lumière brothers in 1895 shocked audiences all the more because it was genuine.

Though most film makers quickly moved on to making fiction, documentary films never died out, even if they became unfashionable and mostly forgettable: the list of Oscar-winning documentaries contains more duff films than gems.

One of the greatest documentaries, Marcel Ophüls' Le Chagrin et la Pitié, did not win one, even though it exposed a view of Vichy France that his countrymen had tried to hide (and along the way caught on camera Anthony Eden's impeccable French). Then, in 2002, Michael Moore won an Oscar for Bowling for Columbine and documentaries roared back. In 2003, the Oscar went to the Fog of War, a gripping exploration of the life of Robert McNamara; in 2005 Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room was beaten by the anthropomorphic March of the Penguins and last year Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was the sure-fire winner.

This year's five Oscar nominees are all political. Michael Moore's comic take on health care, Sicko, has found plenty of critics as well as viewers. A better winner would be No End in Sight, a bleak and informed examination of why the Iraq war happened, comprised of interviews with those involved. It rescues documentary cinema from Moore's hysteria: critics compare it to Emile de Antonio's 1969 film In the Year of the Pig, which dismantled the case for the Vietnam war.