Godfrey Cheshire’s “Moving Midway” is sort of brilliant in concept and scope– taking on the South, slavery, cinema, and his own family’s history– but boy it could have been better with a bigger budget.

Irena Salina’s “Flow: For Love of Water” was an unfocused mess, but no other film impacted me personally as this one did. Much of the information conveyed was startling and new.

What do you do with an A+ for Substance and a D for Form?

My bottom line on this: because I don’t see filmmaking as math, I can’t see criticism as a grading process. I don’t have a set of firm standards which I apply to all films, because I believe that each film requires me, as Kill the Messenger put it, “to examine the internal logic, aesthetics, and structure of the individual film by criteria that comes from within it instead of external to it.”

Unfortunately, documentaries are now equated with activism, sending messages, and bringing causes to the public’s attention (advocacy docs), as if somehow “the public” is too ignorant to know about the topic (global warming, environmental destruction, racism, etc etc etc) without the assistance of the Vanguard Documentary Hero delivering to them. Am I wrong? Just take a look at the number of grants that exist for documentary filmmakers (in the US). Sundance provides grants to activist films; Gucci Grant does the same; ITVS and many more do it too. Take Trouble the Water - go to their webpage and what do you see? Advocacy, telling you what to do, how to get involved, take Action, Green for All, Social Justice, Witness, blah blah blah. And Trouble the Water isn’t the only doc that does it. These kinds of films have subtle and strong political messages so the audience can leave the theater with a changed heart and mind that conforms to a particular political ideology steeped in messages instead of stories. These grants fund ideologies, not stories. Murderball and Man on Wire are excellent examples of story trumping message.

The true tragedy here is that Full Frame, Sundance, Tribeca, Silverdocs, IDFA, Hot Docs have all manufactured a strong link of equating documentaries with activism and cause based agendas. One only has to gain an understanding of programmers’ ideologies to understand where the agenda comes from and whether it’s conscious or unsconcious.

The vaguer issue, however is how to define “quality.” So much of quality is subjective, yet I think it’s impossible to have a universal set of criteria that outlines quality (nor would I want one, but Kim seems to have transferred her personal criteria to evaluate every film instead of another option: to examine the internal logic, aesthetics, and structure of the individual film by criteria that comes from within it instead of external to it). My number one personal interest when watching a narrative is how much of the actual story comes from the characters’ motivations instead of the hands of the editor, or the agenda of the director. I don’t evaluate the entire film based on that question, but when activism or agenda begins to replace literature and story, then I find myself walking away from the film.

Ballast and Trouble the Water both substitute/transfer the director’s attitudes and personal political ideologies in place of the actual characters who live in those regions in hopes of connecting to people who share those ideologies. Those films are the Two Biggest Disasters the Year that perfectly mimic the larger structural problem of equating films with messages. “What’s your message?” Who cares. “What’s the story!” Here is one exception to the rule, “Don’t kill the messenger.” Yes, it’s time to kill the messenger so the story can live.

Karina implies she does not favor docs that have real access and empathy in favor of those that are “challenging in form and idiosyncratic in content,… trumping artless activism”. And for that she gets the “I am a filmmaker, therefore I will shove my craft down your throat” Critic of the Year Award.

Just to clarify, Karina, I never said that quality of filmmaking shouldn’t be of primary concern in other genres, nor did I anywhere say or imply, as the title of this piece suggests, that docs should be held to a “different” standard than features (by which I assume you actually mean narratives, as opposed to docs, since “features” relates more to the length of the film than its genre).

This was a column specifically about the Oscar-shortlisted docs, though, and many of the points I raised have been raised by other folks, from documentary filmmakers like Jason Kohn (Manda Bala) to A.J. Schnack. Further, while I highlighted only four of the films on the Oscar shortlist, I clarified that I’ve not yet had a chance to see every doc on the list, and therefore couldn’t evaluate them yet one way or the other.

The points that both Chris and Bilge made in their comments are fairly spot-on. There are a lot of “issue” docs that get lauded more for the sympathetic nature of their subjects than for any excellence in the actual filmmaking. Well-made, theatrical documentaries combine both interesting subject matter with some degree of artistry in their filmmaking. There has to be some sort of distinction between “some random person with a camera” — which is what Trouble the Water would have been without the direction Tia Lessin and Carl Deal stepping in to turn the raw footage into an actual film with a narrative flow — and actual filmmaking.

And lastly, the four “rules” in my column were not intended to be (nor do I think I implied they are) anything other than the personal rules by which I evaluate documentaries. I’m certainly not advocating for some hypothetical standard based on my particular views on what differentiates a doc with interesting subject matter from a truly great documentary film. All of us who write about film for a living have our own standards by which we judge what we think about films, whether we write those perspectives down as a “list” or not — including you. If we didn’t all judge films — of any genre — by some sort of personal standards, whatever would be the point of writing our opinions on films to begin with?

The real question to ask is whether there’s any inherent value to an unimaginatively-made, though still perfectly informative documentary, which is a strange netherworld that doesn’t quite exist in fiction film. One side effect of the doc resurgence has been that a lot of these kinds of docs that otherwise would have had a perfectly respectable life on TV have been thrown onto the big screen, where they don’t quite belong.

I mean, I have to review 8,739 of these films every year, and as uninspiring as I find them, I still find it hard to cast them to the trashheap because some (though not all) will obviously hold a great deal of interest to anyone who finds their subject matter fascinating. That’s a different standard perhaps, but these films are almost a genre unto themselves. And every genre kind of has its own standards — one doesn’t judge a Larry Cohen movie by the standards of an Ingmar Bergman movie, for example.